Through The Ages
by Magery
Summary: They, who were once and will one day be Harry and Ginny, from the beginning to the end of time.


I am not a Creationist, by the way. I actually worship the holy trinity of Tony Jones, Malcom Turnbull and Brandon Sanderson (if you've never heard of the first two, you're probably not Australian. If you've never heard of the third, you are _missing out)_.

* * *

_i. genesis_

They are not always born.

In the beginning, they simply _were_.

He was made from nothingness, formed from stardust and the ether, shaped into another's image in the ultimate expression of vanity. She was made from him, created from his flesh and blood but defined as separate, and so, for a moment, they are no longer one. They are new, infant in understanding and forbidden knowledge - curiosity has been defined as sin, after all. All they know, in fact, is each other. And for a long, long time, that is enough.

They spend their days together, revelling in the simple joy of _they_; theirs is a courtship of innocence, of simple words and simpler touches (it takes them four years to discover kissing). She completes him in ways he does not understand; he is the other half of her everything.

To describe what they have as love would be accurate, but insufficient. It is a heavy, heady word, filled with poignant meanings and implications, but even it is not quite accurate. To each other, they are the only other person in the world; the fact that they _are_ the only two people in the world does not diminish the comparison in the slightest.

Time passes, and they discover more about one another, more ways to love one another; they are a beautiful thing to watch, together, but there _is_ nobody else to watch them, and so they remain unobserved save for the constant scrutiny of the cosmos.

Eventually, after the wheel has turned in cycles beyond counting, they begin to wonder if, perhaps, there could be more of them – they do not know what they are, save that they are alive and not each other, and so they begin to wonder if perhaps they could be more than two.

It is then the snake calls to them and tells them they have all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips, if only they choose to take it. It speaks to them of their dreams, whispering and tempting, weaving truth and half-truth into an ever-shrinking web; with each passing day, the thunderstorm on the horizon draws closer, and they begin to forget _must not!_ and begin to wonder _what if? _

They are but human, in the end, human and innocent, and they do not know how words can be like silken steel, as soft as her skin yet dangerous in ways he cannot imagine (they do not even know death, after all).

It does not take long before they are convinced that they have only one choice, that they must be brave and defy the overlord—it will not be thought of bravery, later, but there is a reason they are almost always Gryffindors—in order to achieve their dream.

In order to be more than two.

The apple is red (red like her hair) and they both take a single bite, a single bite that changes the course of history by making sure there _will_ be history. They are cast out, punished by a wrath like lightning from a clear sky (the universe not does forgive and it does not understand), sent into a world that is not the Eden they have always known.

But in the end, they do not care.

They know what they wanted to know, and more importantly, they have each other. And that is all that will ever really matter, for they are each other's heaven.

* * *

_ii. simplicity_

They are not always born to greatness.

Sometimes, they are simply born (a woodcarver's son, a carpenter's daughter); an empire rises around them, born from sand and slaves, but they are beneath its notice and it is above theirs. They live in the same town, the same small community on the outskirts of a major city; they know nothing beyond its walls, and do not particularly care.

They grow up together, first as young children playing together, like all the children in the village do. She is fast and quick to anger, like a newly-struck flame, mercurial and bold like the cats that form part of their religion (if he worships her with his eyes, she does not notice). He is steady, solid and reliable and always lending a helping hand when someone stumbles into the dirt (if she stumbles more around him the older they get, he is unaware).

She is not yet sixteen when they share their first kiss; she stumbles across him whittling wood into a lion's shape and when she asks him who it's for, he simply offers it to her. She thinks it's the nicest thing anyone's done for her in a while, and she leans in to take it, but she underestimates how close he is and suddenly the distance between them is too much.

Suddenly, it will always be too much.

They are married a little over two years later; his father has died and he is now the town's only woodworker (her father works with wood, but he cannot _work_ wood). She is his wife—that is her job, because that was the way the world worked—and she thinks happiness pales in comparison to simply knowing he is hers and she is his, and that is a truth that always will be.

They have plenty of children; he loves them all almost as much as he loves her, and if some of their children can do things that seem slightly abnormal to anyone else (she is the only one who knows he can carve wood with his mind, and he is the only one who knows she once scared a lion away with fire despite not carrying a torch), well, they do not find anything wrong with that.

They grow old together—they do everything together—and if they do not live as long as they one day will (as they once did, in the very beginning), they do not know or worry about it; they are together, and even if it is for a year or twenty, all they need is each other.

One of their children comes home one day to find them lying in bed together; they would be sleeping if it were not for the fact they are far too still. There are smiles on their faces, and she is turned slightly into the cup of his shoulder. His arms are locked around her, as they so often are.

Even death cannot take them from one another.

* * *

_iii. service_

They are not always born to lead.

They are born and raised in a vast city—a cornerstone of civilisation—and never meet as children; he is a soldier's son and she is a senator's daughter, and their circles are not ones that would ever really mix. He learns the way of the sword, to serve the empire, but it is not in his nature. She learns to be beautiful, to be courted by the rich and powerful, but that is not who she is.

Eventually, in the middle of a practice bout, his father stumbles—he is older now, injured in battle—and the blow that would have been blocked crashes into his son's head. Or, at least, it would have, had his son not vanished and reappeared behind him, looking stunned enough for the two of them.

His father has heard the stories, and so he takes his son to the temple, telling them he has been blessed by the gods. As his father leaves, he walks past a man he would never normally meet – a senator, leading his daughter by the hand. It seems she, too, has been blessed by the gods.

And so, the two of them meet as teenagers, learning that they are special, granted holy power by divinities above; they learn together, studying with the priests and the other Blessed, as they are called. This time, it takes them longer to understand what they have in each other – it is only after they have been ordained and sent out into the world to serve that they begin to realise they feel… incomplete when the other is gone.

This time, they share their first kiss when he is twenty, she nineteen, both in the glorious flower of their youth. They are married not six months later; they move quickly, and so does the empire. Some of their peers frown on them for such rash behaviour, but as the years pass and their happiness never fades, the world begins to understand that if the gods had blessed them once, they could easily have been blessed twice.

This time, they do not have any children; there are strict rules about that sort of thing. It would not do well for them to try and challenge the gods – they may have been blessed with power, but it is only for them, not for those who come after. He does not like it—it feels wrong, like he has already paid for the right before—and she occasionally falls into melancholic envy, but that is soon lost in the joy of knowing they will always, at least, have each other.

They are killed when the barbarians invade; the empire is slowly disintegrating, but they have served it all their lives and they will die in its name. They fight to protect children, women, anyone and everyone, but while the Blessed are mighty in battle, they are not quite immortal – she is struck down by an arrow she does not see, and he is taken moments after when he ignores everything around him to catch her before she hits the ground.

They are burned at a pyre, and if the barbarians cannot quite tell the difference between her hair and the flame, they are only appreciating a beauty he has always known.

* * *

_iv. devotion_

They are not always born on the same side.

He is the son of a noble, trained to be a knight, to fight for king and country and to take back the holiest of cities in the name of God; he is raised with honour, to be selfless and the epitome of knightly valour. She is a child of the desert, veiled in black and raised to be a healer like her mother before her. She is kind and caring, helping those in need whenever she can, but woe betide you if you get in her way; for all her compassion, she is impatient and quick to anger, like a dancing flame.

The day they meet is a day wracked by violence, all glinting steel and screaming; the ever-shifting sands are stained red (not like her hair, because blood is not beautiful), mute testaments to destruction and carnage and a holy war that only the vultures will ever win. He was the only one of his band of questers to survive; through luck or fate, he will never know, although as time passes he will lean further and further toward the latter. She took pity on him, not expecting him to survive his wounds and wanting to make his passing easier, because even if he is misguided he is still one of God's children. Her village protested, but she shouted them down, reminding them of their own humanity.

But he did not die – no, under her care his health never ceased to improve (she always did have a magic touch). As he grew stronger, she began to teach him her language, because she had nothing better to do and there was nothing else he _could_ do. And so, through a slow, gentle courtship that neither of them knew even existed, they circled like planets in dying orbits, drifting ever closer on a course defined before their bodies were even born.

He is dry, self-deprecating, easy to embarrass and constantly curious; she is witty, feisty, and whenever he looks at her he cannot help but think of fire (after the fourth time, he knows it's becoming clichéd, but that doesn't mean it's not accurate), ever-changing and entrancing on an elemental level. She is as beautiful as the sunset and as mysterious as the stars; he reminds her of stone, solidly reliable and ruggedly beautiful (she blushes like she's on fire, too). There is a dependability about him, a primal sense of honour and selflessness that she cannot help but admire.

She does not know how old she is when they share their first kiss, and neither does he, and for all that it is forbidden, they do not particularly care. They circle in secret for a time, until he is well enough to start helping around the village; there is an unspoken understanding between them that the man he once was died on the battlefield, and the man he has now become is hers, as she is his.

It takes him four years to be accepted by the village, a former Crusader—a former enemy—becoming one of their foremost protectors. He becomes a guard, standing sentry against bandits and jackals and all that could threaten his new home (she is his home, and he will always try to protect her). She continues as a healer, and though their disparate religions do not allow them to be married, even the most devout of their peers do not protest when her stomach begins to swell.

They have three children, taught Islamic devotion rather than Christian faith because they have realised belief in God is all that matters, and so they simply do what is culturally acceptable. And so, one day, their eldest son asks the local priest if he was born in sin (his parents are not married, after all, and he is a precocious child).

The only answer he receives is that Allah loves his children, and he wants nothing more than for them to love each other as well. He does not understand at first, and so he returns home to see his mother laugh at something his father said before replying, voice high and lilting with amusement. He notices how they are constantly touching – a clasped hand here, a brief embrace there. He notices how, when he's supposed to be asleep but sneaks out (because he's a big boy now and doesn't need a bedtime), he finds his father stroking his mother's hair with a tenderness that he would describe as intimate if he knew what the word meant, as she burrows into his embrace.

And then he realises that there is no sin in love, even if it cannot be officially acknowledged in the eyes of God.

* * *

_v. cleave_

They are not always born for happy endings.

This time is the first time they attend Hogwarts. He is a Slytherin, she is a Gryffindor, and so they are supposed to grow up on the opposite ends of a wand; their families are opposed, too, locked on opposite sides of a feud so bitter its origins have been lost to antiquity. They do not truly meet until his last year (the Quidditch pitch is a battlefield, and this time they are both fighting so it does not count), when she has to break up a fight between him and her elder brother before they truly end up killing one another.

She steps in between their wands, heedless of her own safety, and her brother's arm drops immediately – his takes longer to fall, and she can feel his gaze sliding over her skin like he's trying to see to the very marrow of her bones, but fall it does and all that is left is fading smoke and the memory of spellfire as he turns and walks away (it is not much longer before the current Headmaster decrees any more fighting in the halls will be punished by expulsion).

He starts to stumble across her in the hallways, and she finds herself welcoming his 'visits'; they talk of little, inconsequential things, and if she's surprised to find he has a sense of humour, she does not show it. She starts to find him in the library, studying quietly; one day she decides to join him, and even if they do not speak at all, there is an unspoken understanding that they are no longer enemies. Sometimes, she thinks back to the day they first met and wonders if they ever truly were.

They share their first kiss when she is drifting between sixteen and seventeen, and the story would proceed much as it has always done were it not for the fact her brother caught them. Enraged, her brother attacks (no matter how much they try to cleave together, their families will always cleave them apart), and she is thrust to one side before the Headmaster arrives and declares the two men expelled for breaking his decree.

She, who had just begun to love him, spends her remaining years at school ostracized from her family for kissing 'that boy' and forcing her brother to step in and 'defend her honour'. He, who for once had loved her first, finishes his education at another school, mind constantly turning to _what could have_ _been_ rather than _what is_. They never meet again, for her family moves to France while he takes up his Lordly post in London; the two of them never marry (she joins a nunnery, and he does not particularly care if his name dies with him).

And if he has a friend called William, who will one day become a playwright of some renown, well, every story has to have come from _somewhere_.

* * *

_vi. normal_

They are not always born with magic.

He is a mechanic's son - his mother died in childbirth, and it is left to his lost, lonely father to care for his only son. She is a milkman's daughter, but it is her mother—a seamstress—who raises her (she knows he loves her, but she wishes he wouldn't have to work so hard all the time). They both go to the same school, though she is a year younger, and both their parents are always telling them to study hard and do their best, so they can aspire to be something greater than those who came before.

He is quiet, studious, neither popular nor a pariah, always willing to lend a helping hand to those in need; he spends his lunches in the library, studying and tutoring and learning. She is feisty, outspoken, hated by none and liked by all because even though she is brash and sometimes arrogant, there is an earthiness about her, a sense that she is just like the girl next door, not plain nor ordinary but simply _real_.

They first meet when she is twelve and he thirteen; she is struggling with mathematics and one of her friends reminds her about the stories of a boy in the library—she never goes there during lunch—who's willing to tutor anyone who asks without expecting anything in return. And so she goes to him; as the days drift idly into weeks, coalescing into the odd month here and there, she starts to understand what she's being taught (she doesn't understand him, but she's always been a little too curious for her own good and there's a part of her that _wants_ to).

They become friends, eventually—not her first and not his only—and if she visits him in the library once a week with the same religious devotion that her family attends Church every Sunday with, well, that's what friends do. She has the occasional boyfriend (not officially, but there's a few kisses here and there) and he's too busy with his studies for that sort of thing, but those boys never last very long and he always makes time for her. They know things about one another nobody else does: he doesn't want to be a mechanic like his father, he wants to play cricket—he's long and slender like a beanpole, but a surprisingly good bat and a sublime fielder—and maybe one day go to university, and she's not sure what she wants to do except she thinks women don't have as many rights as they should.

He has just graduated when war comes calling; all the propaganda says that fighting for your country is the right thing to do, that being a soldier is the most important of duties, and the sort of thing that men looking to make their own way in the world become. He signs up, wanting to get out from under the shadow of his father's expectations, and though she tries to dissuade him (she does not love him, yet, but she thinks that one day she _could_) he stands firm with the proud stubbornness of a teenager hell-bent on having it their way; they are not together, after all, and if there's a little voice in the back of his head telling him he could lose her if he does this, well, he's as afraid to stay as he is to go.

He writes to her, and she writes to him, their letters his only sense of constancy in the whirling hurricane of blood and death and gunfire that is life on the front; if someone told him war was hell, he'd laugh bitterly and tell them it was probably worse. He's injured a few times—sometimes seriously, but never enough to keep him down for long—and so his letters occasionally dry up; he never connects the faded dampness on her first replies after each of his hiatuses with tears.

Four years later, it's finally over and he's had a lot of time to think (war has a way of straightening your priorities out, like a smith hammering steel). When he gets home, the first time he sees her—she's twenty, he's twenty-one—he sweeps her into his arms and kisses her like she's the centre of his universe; her response really shouldn't surprise him considering she's been signing her letters off with the word 'love' and her name for the last year and a half.

He does go to university, in the end, and she goes with him; they graduate together and are married a year later, in the springtime, joining two lives into one in the season of growth and rebirth. And if he doesn't respond well to bright lights, loud noises and surprises, well, she doesn't really care - all she ever really asked for was to have him back, safe and whole and happy, and if he's found that with her she'll do anything to keep it that way.

She amazes him every day, when he wakes up and finds her curled into his side; they fit together like puzzle pieces (he was never really good with words) and he still doesn't understand why. The Great Depression crashes down the world around them, but even if times are tight and he can't buy her the gifts he thinks she deserves, she doesn't think it really matters because what else can compare to the sheer joy of knowing that they have each other?

He passes away on the thirtieth of July, 1980, surrounded by family—they have children, grand-children and even a great-grandchild—and she slips away a year and eleven days later. Nobody bothers to determine a cause of death, because a broken heart is not medically recognized.

* * *

_vii. together_

But they are _always_ born for each other.

This time, he is the Boy-Who-Lived, she is the Girl-Who-Waited, and they are as fated to be together as they always have been.

It is no coincidence that the power the Dark Lord knows not is love, after all.


End file.
